CHAPTER XVIII THE PENANCE

The course of our story requires us to return to the Capuchin convent, and to the struggles and trials of its Superior; for in his hands is the irresistible authority which must direct the future life of Agnes.

From no guilty compliances, no heedless running into temptation, had he come to love her. The temptation had met him in the direct path of duty; the poison had been breathed in with the perfume of sweetest and most life-giving flowers: nor could he shun that temptation, nor cease to inhale that fatal sweetness, without confessing himself vanquished in a point where, in his view, to yield was to be lost. The subtle and deceitful visit of Father Johannes to his cell had the effect of thoroughly rousing him to a complete sense of his position, and making him feel the immediate, absolute necessity of bringing all the energy of his will, all the resources of his nature, to bear on its present difficulties. For he felt, by a fine intuition, that already he was watched and suspected; any faltering step now, any wavering, any change in his mode of treating his female penitents, would be maliciously noted. The military education of his early days had still left in his mind a strong residuum of personal courage and honor, which made him regard it as dastardly to flee when he ought to conquer, and therefore he set his face as a flint for victory.

But reviewing his interior world, and taking a survey of the work before him, he felt that sense of a divided personality which often becomes so vivid in the history of individuals of strong will and passion. It seemed to him that there were two men within him: the one turbulent, passionate, demented; the other vainly endeavoring by authority, reason, and conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. The discipline of conventual life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings of the nerves are once thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord sometimes utterly bewilders the most practiced self-government.

But he felt that something must be done with himself, and done immediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at the confessional. He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and passionate fears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day. He must hear her confession, not as man, but as God; he must pronounce his judgments with a divine dispassionateness. He must dive into the recesses of her secret heart, and, following with subtile analysis all the fine courses of those fibres which were feeling their blind way towards an earthly love, must tear them remorselessly away. Well could he warn her of the insidiousness of earthly affections; better than any one else he could show her how a name that was blended with her prayers and borne before the sacred shrine in her most retired and solemn hours might at last come to fill all her heart with a presence too dangerously dear. He must direct her gaze up those mystical heights where an unearthly marriage awaited her, its sealed and spiritual bride; he must hurry her footsteps onward to the irrevocable issue.

All this was before him. But ere it could be done, he must subdue himself,—he must become calm and pulseless, in deadly resolve; and what prayer, what penance, might avail for this? If all that he had already tried had so miserably failed, what hope? He resolved to quit for a season all human society, and enter upon one of those desolate periods of retreat from earthly converse well known in the annals of saintship as most prolific in spiritual victories.

Accordingly, on the day after the conversation with Father Johannes, he startled the monks by announcing to them that he was going to leave them for several days.

"My brothers," he said, "the weight of a fearful penance is laid upon me, which I must work out alone. I leave you to-day, and charge you not to seek to follow my footsteps; but, as you hope to escape hell, watch and wrestle for me and yourselves during the time I am gone. Before many days I hope to return to you with renewed spiritual strength."

That evening, while Agnes and her uncle were sitting together in their orange-garden, mingling their parting prayers and hymns, scenes of a very different description surrounded the Father Francesco.

One who looks on the flowery fields and blue seas of this enchanting region thinks that the Isles of the Blest could scarcely find on earth a more fitting image; nor can he realize, till experience proves it to him, that he is in the immediate vicinity of a weird and dreary region which might represent no less the goblin horrors of the damned.

Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair villages and villas, garlanded with roses and flushing with grapes, whose juice gains warmth from the breathing of its subterraneous fires, while just above them rises a region more awful than can be created by the action of any common causes of sterility. There, immense tracts sloping gradually upward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly unlike every common solitude of Nature, that one enters upon it with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural. On all sides are gigantic serpent convolutions of black lava, their immense folds rolled into every conceivable contortion, as if, in their fiery agonies, they had struggled and wreathed and knotted together, and then grown cold and black with the imperishable signs of those terrific convulsions upon them. Not a blade of grass, not a flower, not even the hardiest lichen, springs up to relieve the utter deathliness of the scene. The eye wanders from one black, shapeless mass to another, and there is ever the same suggestion of hideous monster life, of goblin convulsions and strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One's very footsteps have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing over the rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch, as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest contact revealed it.

The sun was just setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples,—with its enchanted islands, its jeweled city, its flowery villages, all bedecked and bedropped with strange shiftings and flushes of prismatic light and shade, as if they belonged to some fairy-land of perpetual festivity and singing,—when Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent up the mountain, and seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, looked down on the peaceful landscape.

Above his head, behind him, rose the black cone of the mountain, over whose top the lazy clouds of thin white smoke were floating, tinged with the evening light; around him, the desolate convulsed waste, so arid, so supernaturally dreary; and below, like a soft enchanted dream, the beautiful bay, the gleaming white villas and towers, the picturesque islands, the gliding sails, flecked and streaked and dyed with the violet and pink and purple of the evening sky. The thin new moon and one glittering star trembled through the rosy air.

The monk wiped from his brow the sweat that had been caused by the toil of his hurried journey, and listened to the bells of the Ave Maria pealing from the different churches of Naples, filling the atmosphere with a soft tremble of solemn dropping sound, as if spirits in the air took up and repeated over and over the angelic salutation which a thousand earthly lips were just then uttering. Mechanically he joined in the invocation which at that moment united the hearts of all Christians, and as the words passed his lips, he thought, with a sad, desolate longing, of the hour of death of which they spake.

"It must come at last," he said. "Life is but a moment. Why am I so cowardly? why so unwilling to suffer and to struggle? Am I a warrior of the Lord, and do I shrink from the toils of the camp, and long for the ease of the court before I have earned it? Why do we clamor for happiness? Why should we sinners be happy? And yet, O God, why is the world made so lovely as it lies there, why so rejoicing, and so girt with splendor and beauty, if we are never to enjoy it? If penance and toil were all we were sent here for, why not make a world grim and desolate as this around me?—then there would be nothing to seduce us. But our path is a constant fight; Nature is made only to be resisted; we must walk the sharp blade of the sword over the fiery chasm to Paradise. Come, then!—no shrinking!—let me turn my back on everything dear and beautiful, as now on this landscape!"

He rose and commenced the perpendicular ascent of the cone, stumbling and climbing over the huge sliding blocks of broken lava, which grated and crunched beneath his feet with a harsh metallic ring. Sometimes a broken fragment or two would go tinkling down the rough path behind him, and sometimes it seemed as if the whole loose black mass from above were about to slide, like an avalanche, down upon his head;—he almost hoped it would. Sometimes he would stop, overcome by the toil of the ascent, and seat himself for a moment on a black fragment, and then his eye would wander over the wide and peaceful panorama below. He seemed to himself like a fly perched upon some little roughness of a perpendicular wall, and felt a strange airy sense of pleasure in being thus between earth and heaven. A sense of relief, of beauty, and peacefulness would steal over him, as if he were indeed something disfranchised and disembodied, a part of the harmonious and beautiful world that lay stretched out beneath him; in a moment more he would waken himself with a start, and resume his toilsome journey with a sullen and dogged perseverance.

At last he gained the top of the mountain,—that weird, strange region where the loose, hot soil, crumbling beneath his feet, was no honest foodful mother-earth, but an acrid mass of ashes and corrosive minerals. Arsenic, sulphur, and many a sharp and bitter salt were in all he touched, every rift in the ground hissed with stifling steam, while rolling clouds of dun sullen smoke, and a deep hollow booming, like the roar of an immense furnace, told his nearness to the great crater. He penetrated the sombre tabernacle, and stood on the very brink of a huge basin, formed by a wall of rocks around a sunken plain, in the midst of which rose the black cone of the subterraneous furnace, which crackled and roared, and from time to time spit up burning stones and cinders, or oozed out slow ropy streams of liquid fire.

The sulphurous cliffs were dyed in many a brilliant shade of brown and orange by the admixture of various ores, but their brightness seemed strange and unnatural, and the dizzying whirls of vapor, now enveloping the whole scene in gloom, now lifting in this spot and now in that, seemed to magnify the dismal pit to an indefinite size. Now and then there would come up from the very entrails of the mountain a sort of convulsed sob of hollow sound, and the earth would quiver beneath his feet, and fragments from the surrounding rocks would scale off and fall with crashing reverberations into the depth beneath; at such moments it would seem as if the very mountain were about to crush in and bear him down in its ruins.

Father Francesco, though blinded by the smoke and choked by the vapor, could not be content without descending into the abyss and exploring the very penetralia of its mysteries. Steadying his way by means of a cord which he fastened to a firm projecting rock, he began slowly and painfully clambering downward. The wind was sweeping across the chasm from behind, bearing the noxious vapors away from him, or he must inevitably have been stifled. It took him some little time, however, to effect his descent; but at length he found himself fairly landed on the dark floor of the gloomy enclosure.

The ropy, pitch-black undulations of lava yawned here and there in red-hot cracks and seams, making it appear to be only a crust over some fathomless depth of molten fire, whose moanings and boilings could be heard below. These dark congealed billows creaked and bent as the monk stepped upon them, and burned his feet through his coarse sandals; yet he stumbled on. Now and then his foot would crush in, where the lava had hardened in a thinner crust, and he would draw it suddenly back from the lurid red-hot metal beneath. The staff on which he rested was constantly kindling into a light blaze as it slipped into some heated hollow, and he was fain to beat out the fire upon the cooler surface. Still he went on half-stifled by the hot and pungent vapor, but drawn by that painful, unnatural curiosity which possesses one in a nightmare dream. The great cone in the centre was the point to which he wished to attain,—the nearest point which man can gain to this eternal mystery of fire. It was trembling with a perpetual vibration, a hollow, pulsating undertone of sound like the surging of the sea before a storm, and the lava that boiled over its sides rolled slowly down with a strange creaking; it seemed the condensed, intensified essence and expression of eternal fire, rising and still rising from some inexhaustible fountain of burning.

Father Francesco drew as near as he could for the stifling heat and vapor, and, resting on his staff, stood gazing intently. The lurid light of the fire fell with an unearthly glare on his pale, sunken features, his wild, haggard eyes, and his torn and disarranged garments. In the awful solitude and silence of the night he felt his heart stand still, as if indeed he had touched with his very hand the gates of eternal woe, and felt its fiery breath upon his cheek. He half-imagined that the seams and clefts which glowed in lurid lines between the dark billows would gape yet wider and show the blasting secrets of some world of fiery despair below. He fancied that he heard behind and around the mocking laugh of fiends, and that confused clamor of mingled shrieks and lamentations which Dante describes as filling the dusky approaches to that forlorn realm where hope never enters.

"Ah, God," he exclaimed, "for this vain life of man! They eat, they drink, they dance, they sing, they marry and are given in marriage, they have castles and gardens and villas, and the very beauty of Paradise seems over it all,—and yet how close by burns and roars the eternal fire! Fools that we are, to clamor for indulgence and happiness in this life, when the question is, to escape everlasting burnings! If I tremble at this outer court of God's wrath and justice, what must be the fires of hell? These are but earthly fires; they can but burn the body: those are made to burn the soul; they are undying as the soul is. What would it be to be dragged down, down, down, into an abyss of soul-fire hotter than this for ages on ages? This might bring merciful death in time: that will have no end."

The monk fell on his knees and breathed out piercing supplications. Every nerve and fibre within him seemed tense with his agony of prayer. It was not the outcry for purity and peace, not a tender longing for forgiveness, not a filial remorse for sin, but the nervous anguish of him who shrieks in the immediate apprehension of an unendurable torture. It was the cry of a man upon the rack, the despairing scream of him who feels himself sinking in a burning dwelling. Such anguish has found an utterance in Stradella's celebrated "Pietà, Signore," which still tells to our ears, in its wild moans and piteous shrieks, the religious conceptions of his day; for there is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression in its music.

When the oppression of the heat and sulphurous vapor became too dreadful to be borne, the monk retraced his way and climbed with difficulty up the steep sides of the crater, till he gained the summit above, where a comparatively free air revived him. All night he wandered up and down in that dreary vicinity, now listening to the mournful roar and crackle of the fire, and now raising his voice in penitential psalms or the notes of that terrific "Dies Iræ" which sums up all the intense fear and horror with which the religion of the Middle Ages clothed the idea of the final catastrophe of humanity. Sometimes prostrating himself with his face towards the stifling soil, he prayed with agonized intensity till Nature would sink in a temporary collapse, and sleep, in spite of himself, would steal over him.

So waned the gloomy hours of the night away, till the morning broke in the east, turning all the blue wavering floor of the sea to crimson brightness, and bringing up, with the rising breeze, the barking of dogs, the lowing of kine, the songs of laborers and boatmen, all fresh and breezy from the repose of the past night.

Father Francesco heard the sound of approaching footsteps climbing the lava path, and started with a nervous trepidation. Soon he recognized a poor peasant of the vicinity, whose child he had tended during a dangerous illness. He bore with him a little basket of eggs, with a melon and a fresh green salad.

"Good-morning, holy father," he said, bowing humbly. "I saw you coming this way last night, and I could hardly sleep for thinking of you; and my good woman, Teresina, would have it that I should come out to look after you. I have taken the liberty to bring a little offering;—it was the best we had."

"Thank you, my son," said the monk, looking wistfully at the fresh, honest face of the peasant. "You have taken too much trouble for such a sinner. I must not allow myself such indulgences."

"But your Reverence must live. Look you," said the peasant, "at least your Reverence will take an egg. See here, how handily I can cook one," he added, striking his stick into a little cavity of a rock, from which, as from an escape-valve, hissed a jet of hot steam,—"see here, I nestle the egg in this little cleft, and it will be done in a twinkling. Our good God gives us our fire for nothing here."

There was something wholesomely kindly and cheerful in the action and expression of the man, which broke upon the overstrained and disturbed musings of the monk like daylight on a ghastly dream. The honest, loving heart sees love in everything; even the fire is its fatherly helper, and not its avenging enemy.

Father Francesco took the egg, when it was done, with a silent gesture of thanks.

"If I might make bold to say," said the peasant, encouraged, "your Reverence should have some care for yourself. If a man will not feed himself, the good God will not feed him; and we poor people have too few friends already to let such as you die. Your hands are trembling, and you look worn out. Surely you should take something more, for the very love of the poor."

"My son, I am bound to do a heavy penance, and to work out a great conflict. I thank you for your undeserved kindness. Leave me now to myself, and come no more to disturb my prayers. Go, and God bless you!"

"Well," said the peasant, putting down the basket and melon, "I shall leave these things here, any way, and I beg your Reverence to have a care of yourself. Teresina fretted all night for fear something might come to you. The bambino that you cured is grown a stout little fellow, and eats enough for two,—and it is all of you; so she cannot forget it. She is a busy little woman, is Teresina; and when she gets a thought in her head, it buzzes, buzzes, like a fly in a bottle, and she will have it your Reverence is killing yourself by inches, and says she, 'What will all the poor do when he is gone?' So your Reverence must pardon us. We mean it all for the best."

So saying, the man turned and began sliding and slipping down the steep ashy sides of the mountain cone with a dexterity which carried him to the bottom in a few moments; and on he went, sending back after him a cheerful little air, the refrain of which is still to be heard in our days in that neighborhood. A word or two of the gay song fluttered back on the ear of the monk,—

"Tutta gioja, tutta festa."

So gay and airy it was in its ringing cadence that it seemed a musical laugh springing from sunny skies, and came fluttering into the dismal smoke and gloom of the mountaintop like a very butterfly of sound. It struck on the sad, leaden ear of the monk much as we might fancy the carol of a robin over a grave might seem, could the cold sleeper below wake one moment to its perception. If it woke one regretful sigh and drew one wandering look downward to the elysian paradise that lay smiling at the foot of the mountain, he instantly suppressed the feeling and set his face in its old deathly stillness.